Staff posts are in bold
I got MSR the other day, why I didn't get it before puzzles me now. It looks amazing. What surprised me a bit, though I now remember having noticed it in screenshots, was the absence of MIP-mapping. Although it does cause some pixellation it is no worse than blurring and keeps the details in the distance. My question is, was it an artistic or technical decision not to use MIP-mapping?
I must give kudos (pun intended of course) to you guys for the visual appearence of the game, because the buildings and scenery feel HUGE. The skyscrapers in Tokyo really feel like scyscrapers and not like hollow matchboxes as in many other racing games. Racing in Tokyo at night was a very powerful experience, the sense of presence in this game is absolutely stellar.
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Hi Ho!
Belive it, there are mip maps!!! There must be... :) Ervery game use and NEED mip mapping, you don't have enough power to live without!!!
I never saw the mip maps (from msr) outside the game, bu I guess they done with love! First resize, and a litle paintshop (to redraw the importent details)...finsih!!!
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or i'm wrong
tell me if I'm on the wrong way :) thnx
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Hi,
on a cold January afternoon did we have a fireplace chat about that topic:
If you search a little more you should find also the thread about mipmapping. I don't think that BC will make another reply to yours...
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oki alright :)
btw. Know somebody the Car Polycount?
I guess about 1500?!
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Further findings
Well, I couldn't actually find the thread on MIP-mapping...
Anyway, I have noticed upon further examination that MSR does use MIP-mapping, but only for the most critical textures, such as gravel and the tiling of a tunnel wall in Tokyo. I guess they did indeed skip it for most textures so to preserve detail.
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Howdy doodly do,
I'll try and not ramble... too much to do for E3 and all that... anyway....
Yes... things are mip-mapped.... not everything though... and this was a combination of technical and artistic reasons... on the technical front... mip-mapping the tree textures were a real speed win for us based on the hardware architecture, so they were a must. The railings and fences on the other hand(which is where most of the problems occur) were tried... and the mip-mapping just made them look even worse... quite close into the distance they'd turn into horrible messes... it's a case of where it works... use it... where it doesn't... don't...
The other side of the coin was we didn't have enough video ram to mip-map everything either... if you let the artists go mad and build cities with that many textures... they're gonna fill up what precious memory you have pretty quickly... there's loads of unique textures on buildings... such is modelling real life... :(
Hope this answers your questions... and hopefully post-E3 we'll be able to respond to other stuff a little quicker than we currently do... it's just we're a tad busy at the moment... :)
Cheers,
Trent
Senior Programmer
Project Gotham (and MSR)
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It is amazing how much faster the frame rate does increase with mipmapping - on Hellgate we mipmapped a lot, and we did get a pretty dramatic increase in speed. Of course, video RAM gets decidedly low but that's the trade off you get.
I don't think the pavement barriers around the course on MSR are mipmapped - hence the "strobing" effect you get. Saying that, if they were mipmapped, you'd probably get a bit of a blurry mess halfway down the course. In some areas of San Francisco as well, you can tell many textures aren't mipmapped because of some strobing effects on brickwork and some of the skyscrapers.
Oh, I'm reading in many PS2 mags about the possibility of a PS2 MSR. Is this true? It certainly is the right genre for PS2 being a driving game and all... ^_^
Would you just do a straight port and limit the texture space, or chuck more polies in the cars, ooorrrr maybe use some of the city geometry from Project Gotham? The basic rule of thumb for DC and PS2 development is that Dreamcast has more textures to chuck around but less polies, but PS2 has more polies to chuck around and less textures.
Hope my wealth of development information gained from stress, pain and other such delights helps.. :)
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The cool thing is, you can well compensate for lower poly counts through good use of texturing, but you can never make up for N64-ish textures... Innit, Steve? :D
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Much as it pains me to think about MSR on PS2... *urk* I mean, Quake III Revolution on PS2 is also texture intensive. Oooh, look. Blurry N64 textures. Just like Mr. Sony said - "Graphics like Toy Story" ^_^
I'll think I'll watch some non-blurry DVDs.
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Is anybody wondering why MSR doesnt have full headlight effects? The headlights in the game only shine in front of the cars about 2 feet! I wonder why the headlights dont shine far into the distance, and onto objects? Maybe the Dreamcast couldnt handle it, although I dont see why it couldnt, since a lot of psx games used it! Or maybe the developers didnt have time to fine tune the effect! Thats the only thing I didnt like about the game, during the night races, I couldnt see a damn thing! Other than that, everything else was spectacular! Well, at least I get what I want on the X-Box version!
Take care all.
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